One issue I’ve brought up numerous times over the years but rarely heard elsewhere is aisle-and-drive waste. The first cost of off-street parking is the access drive from the street to the parking lot. Once there, the lot requires an aisle to access the spaces, with a typical 65’ double-loaded lot being 18’ x 2 = 36’ of parking and the aisle being 29’, or 44.6% of the lot plus the total access drive area. Single-loaded, which is more common for small multifamily buildings like the one pictured here, is worse, with the aisle being 61.7% of the parking lot, plus the total access drive area. In addition to that, municipalities often require a back-out extension of the aisle for spaces at the end to make it easier to maneuver. Counting all these things, the total aisle-and-drive waste can easily be 70% of the total paved area required for off-street parking.

Much-maligned on-street parking, on the other hand, has no such burdens because the travel lanes are the aisles, so the only thing you’re adding are the spaces themselves. Couple this with the fact that so many streets are overly wide, like the street I live on now which is 36’ wide so at most all you’d have to use is a little paint to indicate spaces to create 8’ parking lanes on each side resulting in 10’ travel lanes, or better yet just don’t stripe any curbs yellow or put up any No Parking signs and people will do what people do and park on the street.

Bottom line: in addition to every normal point against off-street parking requirements, aisle-and-drive waste can easily be triple the cost of on-street parking. So for all who do the math, aisle-and-drive waste is a cost you really don’t want to miss.